Outdoor Painting

I decided to capture the great blossoming nature outside my window, as I’m stuck on polishing the next 30 Day Art Challenge Post.

Unfortunately, by the time I gathered my painting equipment – most our plants blossoms had already withered again. A bit of a downfall to my mood, but as I’m stubborn by nature and creative by trade, I decided to go anyway; if the weather allowed. Luckily, the weather didn’t change much during the last few days and I packed my drawing paper, aquarelle case, thin paint brush, a little water bottle and the cats to go outside and see what might catch my eye.

Of course I had planned of getting the cats somehow in the picture and my plan worked out quite well.

Eye of the Beholder

As you might see in this picture one of my cats drinks out of a bucket. If you haven’t seen it, it’s probably my fault. I tried.

I wanted to work with the colors and catch the cats “in action” which makes it a bit difficult to get a good painting going – but this blog is all about challenges, so no way to back down. I personally like the outcome, but I understand if the painting is a bit difficult to decipher.

I especially liked having some vegetation and a cat in the picture, ideally interacting with their surroundings. I think this painting meets the requirements better than my other tries. I also like the lightness of the picture and how I hit the color range of my little striped tiger. I guess, I will admit it now – I got it for red hair.

He really has nice markings and everybody says what a pretty cat he is – so I really wanted to get that on the page. Especially with the green of the leaves complementing his fur. It’s always fun seeing him jump through the grass in our garden.

Difficulties – Moving TarCATs

I mentioned cats previously – plural. Well, I tried to capture both of my cats but as it was a beautiful sunny day with a bit of wind, they rather ran around, hid and jumped at things, than staying still to be portrait.

Especially the other one decided it was more fun to play with everything she could get her claws on than to stick to one pose. She even attacked my pencil and wouldn’t let me sketch for a while. It was a little bit of a nuisance.

In the end, the cats got so playful around me, that they started to fight. They usually get along fine, but a human outside gets them apparently a bit too excited and too close together. They ran after each other, had a stand-off or two, started hitting, biting and finally some growling. By then I broke it off. It was time to go inside again anyway and fodder and the great insides changed their mood for the better.

Long story short, I only got this little glimpse of my other cat, the black one, on paper. Not intentionally, I like them both, but she’s just not the serene type.

Aquarelle Tip for Portable Water Color Set

I haven’t mentioned it in my Painted Rock Lobster post, but a little handy trick I use when drawing “abroad” is putting water in a small plastic bottle, which closes tightly.

I use it like any other container for wetting or cleaning the brush, but the good thing about a plastic bottle is, that you can close it up when your done and when you want to change the water and have a restroom nearby – as would have been the case with the “Haus des Meeres” – you can easily exchange the water with no fuzz or spilling dirty water on your things.

Don’t know, if this comes in handy with you, but I really like this little trick for doing location-independing water color painting. Of course, a tiny paint set like this also helps.